2024-09-29 04:14:43
Luis Ortega He was walking down the street when he saw an image that transported him to his first feature film, black box (2002): a very tall Russian tramp dressed as a woman, with a purse, a fur coat and boots. She started following him because she was curious, and discovered that he went to all the pharmacies, weighed himself, and left. At one point he gained courage and approached him to ask what was wrong, to which the boy, sweaty and nervous, responded that on all the scales he weighed zero. “I don’t exist, but they are chasing me,” he concluded before running away. That scene lubricated his creative gears and over time it became the first cell of The jockeyhis new job after The angel (2018). Premiered in the Official Competition of the Venice Film Festival and part of the battalion of national productions of the section Latin Horizons of San Sebastiánthe brand new preselected by the Film Academy to represent Argentina in the race for the Oscar for Best International Film It arrived last Thursday on the commercial billboard.
“At one point Luis asked him how he had come and he told him: ‘Look, I’m going to tell you that I came by plane because otherwise I’m going to confuse you’,” he recalls, laughing. Nahuel Pérez Biscayartin charge of putting the body on the fictional creature “based” on that homeless man. His name is Remo Manfredini and he is a jockey legendary for his successes whose self-destructive behavior, with excesses of substances of all kinds and colors, pushes him into the abyss of a total crisis. Not only does it threaten his relationship with his girlfriend April (the Spanish Úrsula Corberó), who however will be next to him with stoicism; also the possibility of settling debts with his mafia boss. The cherry on this toxic dessert is a serious accident that takes him to a hospital from which he escapes to begin wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, thus beginning what Pérez Bizcayart will call lines below a “spiral of transformation”.
A transformation that opens the doors to a story where surrealism meets comedy deadpanwhere the logic of the world (of this world) matters little and nothing. Because The jockey It is as free as the spirit of Ortega and Pérez Bizcayart, an actor who has made roaming a norm and has filmed much of his most recognized work in Europe. In France, for example, 120 beats per minuteby Robert Campillo, in which he played an Act Up-Paris activist who in the early 1990s fights to achieve greater visibility and involvement of the government and pharmaceutical companies in the fight against AIDS. This work earned him the César (equivalent to the French Oscar) for Best Acting Revelation and a nomination at the European Film Awards.
Pérez Bizcayart had been part of the cast of Powder (2014), making Ortega the only director he worked with more than once. The actor says: “We almost did The angelbut they fired me because I don’t raise funds or I’m not famous, and we had that thorn in our side. The reunion happened very naturally because we have a bond with Luis almost from when we were kids. I can see it very often or not see it for years, and the understanding is always intact. One day he told me that he had an idea, which at that time was called watermelon headand he sent me a version of the script. I read it, I loved it, and then he sent me a more finished one. It was all very fluid. When things happen in a very organic way, you don’t even think about how it happened. I guess we were looking forward to working together. And he had also written this film inspired by a Russian man he met on the street…”
-Where will you find those types of characters, right?
-Well, Luis is an expert in that. He is an Arltian: he goes through life exploring the underworld and the overworld with great mischief. He attracts, he is a magnet of personalities, experiences, adrenaline. He is a producer of life situations that makes no difference between life and cinema. I think that’s why he makes movies, because it’s the only time he can legally, officially, and being paid, daydream. Filming with Luis is that, it’s not “ah, well, it’s a professional project.” Yes, of course it is and it is a filming that occurs at a certain moment, but it is more of a human experience that unites us again and makes us travel together. It is a shared adventure.
-How is that freedom and the semi-chaotic creative process articulated with the more professional schemes where producers from several countries coexist, interests at stake, a shooting plan with schedules and dozens of people depending on it? The jockey maintains the imprint of the films that he filmed ten or fifteen years ago with a couple of friends…
-I don’t know how it is articulated, but it is articulated. When one is sensitive to the game and knows how to play, even if the rules change a little, the essence and deep fire remain the same. The filming was the same as Powder and that anything else we could have done with Luis with two handles. It is the same curiosity, the same dedication, but with resources to be able to fantasize with more colors. I thought about that a lot on the set. He told me “how beautiful to see how the hard core remains the same, with the same level of self-confidence, sensitivity, irreverence and willingness to play, as if we were making a film in which no one bothers us.” And they did kick us out, because at the end of the day the production manager appeared making a bad face. Which is fine, because it’s your job, and if you didn’t, things would never end.
-Perhaps for a project with so much freedom, that structure is a containment dam, a way of being able to achieve concrete results.
-It has happened to us when we filmed at our leisure and the film ended more by decantation than anything else. It’s great that different production contexts can dialogue. We work with limitation. In cinema, all the time we are working with a reality, which is a bit limited. And within that reality, one, opens, opens and opens, but we always return to the concrete. The tension in the cinema is very marked by that. Then why they wanted to produce this film, I don’t know. But that it exists at this moment is a sign that there is a need for strangeness, in the sense of surprise, and to go a little outside the established. Without it being a super cryptic or niche film, I feel that it invites and then demands, requests participation. And we are a little saturated with the tyranny of the plot and scripts that are only good, produce anxiety in the viewer and do not let them off the screen. The jockey He invites you in a very fierce way to a show and then lets you loose inside so you can have your own experience, and get lost without that being synonymous with abandonment.
-You mentioned the scripts that produce anxiety and in Venice you said that freedom was something that gave anxiety, but that it was a very nice responsibility. Remo is someone who is exercising his freedom to search for who he is and what he wants. Is that so?
-Yes, in fact, Remo takes care of her, and I would even say that he looks for her and provokes her, because it’s not really known if the horse thing is an accident or not. It is as if there is a portal that has to open and in which the arrival of this UFO element, which is a horse from Japan, is the starting point towards this spiral of transformation that Remo fully embraces, as if it were deeply own.
-Remo has something of a clown, including silent comedy and sadness. The English newspaper The Guardian He said he was a sort of “Buster Keaton with a riding crop.” Were there any comedians or records that you used as a reference?
-I have no references, I have no models, I am not a fan of anyone. I’m a disaster in that sense. Obviously I work in one line, but it is simply because of a question of life on Earth and because we come after another. But I don’t work from a reproductive or referential place, not at all. And I’m not interested either. But it is true that all those who preceded us live in me because life is a succession. They have told me about Buster Keaton several times, I admire him again and it seems like a super compliment to me…
-There is something more intuitive, then…
-Completely. The only thing that connects me to work in an inspiring and powerful way – in the sense of creativity, not hierarchy – is that it comes as close as possible to my childhood enthusiasm. Ultimately, the place where something is activated is personal, genuine, surprising even to yourself, unfathomable and very playful. It is a happiness that has no explanation, that is because it is. If you can connect from there, your language will appear. I think the work I did when I was a teenager and there were five of us filming helped me. From there, one can dissolve, expand, explore, soak in everything. But always from a place that keeps you in suspense, with curiosity and the desire to continue exploring.